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Intimacy Creation - A Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers intimacy ignorance; the two
major kinds of intimacy; sexual intimacy; emotional intimacy; the
cultural complications of intimacy; and then gives you a dozen ways to
work toward creating and enhancing emotional intimacy in your own,
personal life.

Intimacy Ignorance

Can you say “My most intimate experiences are among the very best
experiences of my life!”? Can you say “The intimacy I share with those I
love most provides me with my most valued, special feelings!”? Can you
say “Intimacy with a loved one has been a supreme and sublime, love
experience like no other!!”? Can you say “I know very well how to go
about creating intimacy and intimacy experiences with those I love!”?

“She told me we just were not intimate enough, often enough. At
first I thought she meant sex but that turned out to be quite wrong. So
what does she mean? How in the world do I go about whatever this
intimacy thing is?”

Often I hear this sort of question when I’m doing relationship
counseling or coaching with men. However, there are related statements I
get from females. Their statements often are something like “Isn’t he
just supposed to know how to be intimate if he loves me? If he hasn’t
learned how to be intimate by now doesn’t that mean something’s wrong
with him and our relationship can’t work? If I have to tell him how to
be intimate won’t that spoil it? ”

Sometimes I get a female’s statement like this: “I don’t know how to
tell him what I mean by intimacy. He is willing to learn but I only
know it when I feel it, but I can’t explain how to get there. Of
course, there are females who make statements more like the males and
males who make statements more like the females, so it’s not strictly a
gender thing.

Another kind of statement I sometimes get in counseling concerning
intimacy goes like this: “Our sex just isn’t very intimate.” Or
sometimes, “ When we feel really intimate with each other it just never
turns into anything sexual, and I want it to be sexual at least
sometimes but we don’t know how to make that happen.”.

Two Kinds of Intimacy

I like to suggest that the first thing to get clear about is that
there are two main types of intimacy – emotional and sexual. They go
well together but also they can be confused with one another. When this
confusion occurs people frequently end up having difficult problems
with each other. It also is quite important to understand that people
can have sex without emotional intimacy just as easily as they can have
emotional intimacy without sex.

Sexual Intimacy

Sexual intimacy can be said to occur when people closely and
personally experience each other’s activated and shared sexuality. This
can occur via sight, sound, touch, scent, taste and kinetics. It also
can occur via shared sexual thoughts and feelings, well shown and
expressed physically and emotionally.

Sexual Intimacy often involves disclosing one’s sexual self to
another, accompanied by close and extensive body exploration, and the
sharing and showing of erotic responses to erotic stimuli. Sexual
Intimacy may or may not involve sexual intercourse and orgasm but it
often does. Some people do not seem to be able to do sexual intimacy
without emotional intimacy, while others do so rather easily.

Still others mix and separate the two, at will, depending on who is
involved and their own, individual, love situation. Sometimes the words
intimacy or sexual intimacy are used to merely mean sexual intercourse
or that some other form of sexual action has occurred. This, I suggest,
is a misuse and more misleading way of using these words.

Emotional Intimacy

Emotional intimacy for most people is a little harder to identify and
define. Emotional intimacy can be said to occur when someone feels an
emotional, close, personal contact and connection with another. This
usually is accompanied with feelings of warm, private affection and
positive regard, and not infrequently with very strong, personal love of
one type or another.

Emotional intimacy can be marked by a depth and breadth of knowledge
of another, and a sense of emotional interweaving with the inner core or
essential nature of another’s innermost, true self. It is most likely
to occur when strong emotions are felt and shared. It can come with
close, physical, mental, social and emotional association.

Occasionally it brings on a sense of two or more beings, at least
temporarily, having a fusion of their core spirits and real
personalities. Emotional intimacy frequently leads to increased love
bonding, sometimes accompanied by a sense of awe and of being
spiritually understood and connected. Recent evidence suggests that
when emotional intimacy occurs there are strong, healthful and perhaps
fairly rare neurochemical processes occurring in the limbic system of
the brain.

Cultural Complications

In the larger, Western world, growing, mega-culture it seems like not
a lot of people learn what emotional intimacy is, let alone how to
create it. Even fewer appear to learn how to maintain and grow intimacy
in ongoing relationships. In our more ‘macho’ societies emotional
intimacy often is regarded by males as feminine and, thereafter,
disregarded, ignored and avoided.

It’s interesting that in some societal spheres things seen as
feminine are put on an ‘idealized pedestal’ in principle but devalued
and psychologically trashed in actuality. Then there are those people
who fake intimacy as just a way to gain something on their hidden agenda
list like money, sex, marriage, etc.

After attainment of the hidden motive, the intimacy actions
disappear. This seems to occur particularly often in cultures and
societal groups oriented primarily to commercialism, consumerism, power,
status attainment, etc. rather than love, cooperation, mutuality and
having a deeper quality of life.

However, all over the world there are people longing and striving for
intimate love connections, intimate romance, emotionally intimate sex,
and relationships filled with intimate emotional intercourse. All over
the world there is the question “How do you go about being emotionally
intimate?”. It would seem most people have very few, clear answers.
The good news is you can learn how to enhance and grow your
intimacy-making skills and, thereby, strengthen and improve your love
relationships.

A Dozen Ways to Work Toward Creating and Enhancing Emotional Intimacy

1. Get Close As you relate to someone slowly get
physically closer and closer to them if the relating seems to be going
well. The closer you get physically the more likely you are to be able
to be emotionally intimate. When close make lots of eye contact.

2. Talk Quietly Intimate, personal talk is
low-voiced, quiet talk, at least at first. Shouting with shared
exuberance may come later but until it does almost whispering does best.

4. Listen Well Always be able to repeat back,
nearly verbatim, what a loved one or an important other says to you.
Always be able to label, describe, or ask about the emotions involved in
what you heard.

6. Reveal Private Feelings Going ‘psychologically
naked’, more and more, is essential for intimacy development. Revealing
the emotions you have and sometimes the physical feelings, along with
behaviors and thoughts, history, hopes, etc. is required.

7. Respect and Accept Revelations and Sharings Usually with kindness and without shock judgment or criticism receive what others intimately share and reveal.

8. Expressionally Communicate Lots Facial
expression, tonal expression, gestural expression, and postural
expression often are more important than verbal expressions.

9. Show Care Have real care for what another is experiencing and show it, be it happiness, or agony, or the most mundane of things.

10. Adventure Together Emotionally Create and seek
out experiences you can jointly experience together that are likely to
engender emotions be they strong, delicate, tender, inspiring,
surprising, reassuring, intense, serene, ecstatic, moving or anything
else.

11. Take and Make Time Make and take the time it takes to have emotional intimacy and don’t rush it.

12. Empathize Frequently Emotional intimacy takes
joining with another by empathetically and sometimes passionately
sharing their pains, and pleasures and also their mediocre times. Avoid
becoming emotionally distant, distracted, absent or frequently
attitudinally against those you would love and be emotionally intimate
with.

Hopefully these 12 points will help you grow your intimacy-making
love skills. Of course, there’s lots more to learn so probably you will
need to venture into this topic more.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success QuestionCan you fantasize and then analyze what would be a wonderfully, emotionally, intimate experience for you and your most beloved?

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